At first, the boy was not a type to wait for more than two weeks to buy a game. That got expensive, seeing as we have a mouth to feed now, so I got him into the bargain hunting habit. Now if we spend $100/month on games, it's for five or six instead of two.

We do have our exceptions, though... mainly any NCAA Football game for him and Karaoke Revolution/Donkey Konga for me.

Yeah, I know. I've checked out most of the database websites that I could locate, and even found a few games lists, but this one ain't on there.

Is it in Japanese?

Shinseiki Odysselya 2 and Shinseiki Odysselya were both published by Vic Tokai, but are Japan-Only.

Similar names...

A quick check of the cartridge proves you to be right. Shinseiki Odysselya (somehow I missed the 'ri' syllable when I first read it, and I didn't notice the kanji at all...) That should make the search for info a bit easier.... though I'd still be surprised to find a walkthru for this one....

I've wanted to play Grim Fandango since I saw an ad for it in the Lucasarts Archives Volume II pack I got for Christmas '96 or so, but was sadly financially dependent back then and never got to buy it -- ditto Starship Titanic, though the ad was in the back of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. While I'm on the subject of Lucasarts Archives Vol. II, TIE Fighter is the greatest dogfighting game in the history of the world. EVER. Sadly, the Windows 98/ME re-release doesn't even come close to the pixellated charm of the original DOS version.

I used to have fun playing Alpha Centauri, but then I lent it to a guy in high school and he graduated without giving it back to me.

I'm too young to have fond memories of some of the classics like X-Com -- I didn't get my first computer until 1995... and yet realizing that 1995 was ten years ago makes me feel so damn OLD. What I DO remember:

The halcyon days of my tender youth:
- The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game at Aurelio's Pizza taught me the art of panhandling my parents, and the lesson that parents don't buy it.
- The Journeyman Project came bundled with aforementioned Packard Bell
Windows '95 box. I can still hear Sinclair's creepy "Poseidon, if you fail... I will assassinate the Cyrollan delegate... myself."
- Operation Neptune, Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, Carmen Sandiego, Oregon Trail, the Munchers series -- sweet crap, did these games ever make learning fun.
- I've said it once, I'll say it again: TIE Fighter is one of the greatest games of all time, and I never even made it past my eighth tour of duty. No matter what the game, escort missions are the absolute worst.

The games I played in computer class while the other kids were learning MS Word:
- Chip's Challenge -- For some reason, the computers in the lab had a Microsoft Entertainment Pack preinstalled.
- Jezzball -- Ditto.
- Aardwolf -- my friend was into pen-and-paper RPGs and told me about online MUDs. My name was Maedhros, in case any of you happened to find my corpse.
- Alien Invasion on javagameplay.com -- I can't believe how many games they've got there now, and the site layout is so... uninspired.

I'm sure I've left out a lot, but that's all I can think of off the top of my head. Someone please back me up on the greatness of these games -- and tell me where I can get some of them.

What is this, the one year anniversary necromancy? But since I missed it the first time around, I might as well join in and comment on the previous entries...

Mravac Kid wrote:

Trespasser for one didn't really get much acclaim, and I find it to be a superb game (if you can get beyond the awkward movements of the hand).

"Didn't really get much acclaim" is an understatement. "Universally hated by all the world's reviewers" is more like it. But aside from the bugs, graphical glitches, immense (for its time) hardware requirements and the fact that, from the amount of guns laying around, Site B seemed to have been the site of several NRA conventions, it was actually pretty entertaining... and the physics (when they worked) were way ahead of their time. And I would like to see someone replicate the interface (without the Ninja Death Grip<sup>TM</sup> and Stretchy Strongman<sup>TM</sup> antics and the like) in another game sometime...

IS_Wolf wrote:

No Master of Magic??

Aside from the poor AI, yup, it was great. "Old man! You seek the Spell of Mastery!"

IS_Wolf wrote:

No It Came From the Desert I+II??No Wings??No Defender of the Crown??

ItCFtD II doesn't really belong on that list IMO, but "Rocket Ranger" definitely does. Cinemaware made some of the best games for the platforms of yore, and Wings, Defender of the Crown and Rocket Ranger were Cinemaware's best games. When you bought a Cinemaware title, you always knew what you were going to get - great gameplay in a very stylish package.

theguy23 wrote:

While I'm on the subject of Lucasarts Archives Vol. II, TIE Fighter is the greatest dogfighting game in the history of the world. EVER.

Make that "space dogfighting game", and I'll agree with you (although Freespace 2 comes close). "Welcome, Admiral Harkov. We have a matter to discuss..."

Anyway, most of the oldies I play nowadays are either Amiga games or "golden age" DOS games, like X-Com, Betrayal at Krondor or MOO2 (I get MOO2 withdrawal at least once every year, forcing me to dig out the CD and play through a full game or two before I can go back to today's games ).

One game that I really liked but almost never hear about now is an old DOS game called Nomad. It was sort of a cross between Elite and Star Control 2. The graphics were a mix of some fairly nice 2D images and some very primitive 3D graphics (no texture maps or shading, just a bunch of flat polygons, fairly low resolution, but it did the job.) Sometimes it seems like I'm the only one on Earth who'se ever played this game (well, my brother an I, at any rate) which is a pity 'cause it was pretty good.

I- I've said it once, I'll say it again: TIE Fighter is one of the greatest games of all time, and I never even made it past my eighth tour of duty. No matter what the game, escort missions are the absolute worst.

Don't remember how far I got in TIE Fighter, but for me the worst were the timed assualts.... given enough time, I could figure out how to work an escort mission, but there was a timed assualt which finally killed it for me... simply could not reach mission objectives with the available material.

As for games that are now somewhat obscure, I'm a huge fan of the Quest for Glory series by Sierra. The other BLANK Quest games were good, but QfG combined the PnP RPG elements, making it a hybrid adventure/RPG game. I just wish that the VGA rerelease of "So You Want to Be a Hero" had included the goblin caves and dwarves that had originally been planned.

Hmmm. There was one game I liked very much, but I can't seem to remember what it was called. Basically you flew a 'spaceship' across a square chunk of space/ plane, took over planets, bombed other planets, invested in colonization and chucked it out with your AI counterpart using nuclear missiles.